Who Framed Roger Rabbit

“I’m not bad,” Jessica Rabbit cooed from beneath a peekaboo curtain of hair, flashing as much scarlet-draped thigh and sideboob as can possibly be squeezed under a PG certificate. “I’m just drawn that way.”

Smokily voiced by Kathleen Turner (with Amy Irving taking over for the sultry torch songs) and drawn like an anatomically impossible hybrid of Veronica Lake and Rita Hayworth, Jessica Rabbit swiftly overtook Betty Boop as the ne plus ultra of animated sex symbols, and she wasn’t even the main attraction. A character of wittily adult conception and appeal, the 2D glamazon nonetheless slotted slinkily into the more antic, kid-friendly hijinks of Robert Zemeckis’s form-bending multimedia comedy, which pitted Bob Hoskins’ dishevelled 1940s Hollywood gumshoe against a manic ensemble of invented cartoon characters and Looney Tunes veterans to solve a snaky showbiz murder mystery.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was, in 1988, an imposingly high-concept confection by Hollywood standards: the driving gimmick of its limber script, that humans and ghettoised cartoon characters could live and interact in the same dimension, was fluidly realised with techniques light years ahead of Mary Poppins’ live-action/animation blending 24 years previously. (Those visual effects won Zemeckis’s film one of its four Oscars.) Were the film released today, its technology might not cause as many jaws to drop, but its storytelling still might: at a time when family-friendly studio entertainments are workshopped, focus-grouped and groupthought to within an inch of their airless lives, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? still stands out as bracingly, remarkably strange for a multimillion-dollar product released under Disney’s auspices through their Touchstone Pictures division.

The striking, simultaneous adult-child function of Roger Rabbit’s storytelling, meanwhile, was largely watered-down into more innocuous family film asides. Even the film’s most obvious latter-day heir, Disney’s whiringly clever, politically infused animal kingdom mystery Zootopia, took fewer tonal risks in its daffy hybrid of kiddie adventure and heavily referential genre cinema – while visually, it was safe, pop-coloured Disney product. Thirty years ago, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was the freshest thing out: a big, bright, eye-popping all-purpose romp that was also darkly funny, suspenseful, touched by madness and even weirdly sexy. It made bank, won Oscars and blazed a trail for what future family films could look, sound and feel like. As glossily as studio animation has evolved in the intervening decades, it’s hard not to feel that Hollywood didn’t follow the flames. Forget it, Jake, it’s Toontown.